In a surgical procedure, a relatively large number of measurements on a patient may need to be made simultaneously, and the measurements may need to be transferred from the patient to a relatively distant console where the measurements may be analyzed and displayed. The problems of transfer may be exacerbated by limited access to the patient. In minimally invasive medical surgery for example, the size of the access to a patient undergoing the surgery may be extremely limited, so that catheters or tools used for the surgery need to have diameters of the order of millimeters. Minimizing the number of conductors used to transfer the measurements enables the diameters of the catheters or tools to be reduced, with corresponding benefit to the patient.
Documents incorporated by reference in the present patent application are to be considered an integral part of the application except that to the extent any terms are defined in these incorporated documents in a manner that conflicts with the definitions made explicitly or implicitly in the present specification, only the definitions in the present specification should be considered.